This Week in History: America’s middle point
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
Each decade, the Census calculates the mean center of population – the place where an imaginary map of the U.S. would balance perfectly if every American weighed the same.
In other words, it’s the middle point of where all Americans live.
The first census of 1790 located this center of population 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland.
By the next decade, the point had moved to 18 miles west of Baltimore and by 1820, the migration of Americans had tipped the center even further westward to a point 16 miles east of Moorfield, West Virginia.
The history of the United States is a story of movement – of restless men and women spreading out across the continent, over mountains and across prairies like the spores of a great fungus cast to the wind.
And like a fungus, wherever these wayward people landed, they propagated and expanded, consuming the nutrients of the land and driving out all native life before sending forth their own spores to race ever westward.
That’s one analogy for our nation’s westward migration. Another, far rosier, version positions the migrant at the center of some divine prerogative. In this schema, the western land and its people were put on this earth to test the mettle of the young nation, to harden and temper the raw material so that it could go on to do greater things still.
Horace Greeley, famous American journalist and then vice president during the mid-19th century, canonized this vision of the west when he exhorted his readers to, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!” We’re told that he wrote those famous words on July 15, 1865, as the editor of the New York Tribune.
But, like so much of the golden west itself, this now famous slogan is just a mirage – its pomp and esteem billow away to nothing upon closer inspection. If you were to search out a copy of the July 15, 1865, Tribune, you would be rightly frustrated in not finding this phrasing anywhere. If you happen to look at other issues of the paper during that week, or month, or year, you still wouldn’t find it. In fact, here is no evidence whatsoever that Horace Greeley ever wrote those words.
Sure, he said things similar to that slogan, like the following:
“We earnestly urge upon all such [returning Civil War veterans] to turn their faces Westward and colonize the public lands.”
“O, deceive not yourselves thus, young men! To the rightly constituted Man, there always is, there always must be, opportunity.”
“Fly, scatter through the country – go to the Great West.”
“I hold that tens of thousands, who are now barely holding on at the East, might thus place themselves on the high road to competence and ultimate independence at the West.”
All in their own right decent sentences, but none quite as punchy as “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!” So who has the honor of bringing forth the motto of westward migration?
No one, actually. The earliest written occurrence of that exact phrasing appears the August 20, 1870 issue of the magazine Punchinello, in a piece titled “The Mystery of Mr. E. Drood: An Adaptation,” by Orpheus C. Kerr (the pseudonym of Robert Henry Newell:
“As for you, an American boy, why don’t you go to h-I mean to the West. Go West, young man! Buy a good, stout farming outfit, two or three serviceable horses, or mules, a portable house made in sections, a few cattle, a case of fever medicine and then go out to the far West upon Government-land. You’d better go to one of the hotels for to-night, and then purchase Mr. GREELEY’s What I Know About Farming, and start as soon as the snow permits in the morning.”
Wouldn’t it be grand if this were the actual origin of that phrase? Rather than coming from the most eloquent writer of his generation, the now-famous slogan was actually written by a famous humorist for a satirical magazine, which went out of business after only nine months of operation (seriously, Punchinello was inspired by the British satirical magazine Punch, and it only lasted from April to December of 1870).
Alas, we don’t know if that is true or not. But even if the exact phrasing can’t be attributed to him, it is true to say that Greeley was the loudest proponent of westward migration at the time.
Although he himself never went farther west than Colorado, he some form or another, he urged his nation to cast its spores to the westward-blowing wind. By the time of this admonition to “Go West,” the center point of the United States’ population had already crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile valleys of Ohio.
After more than a century of inching westward, the mean center entered the state of Missouri, where it has remained since 1980.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.